Nonfiction review: 'The Last Empty Places' by Peter Stark

Peter Stark has bounced around the world for 40 years, from one adventure to another. A correspondent for Outside magazine and the author of two excellent books, "Last Breath" and "At the Mercy of the River," he's the kind of person who looks at a map and is drawn to the open spaces, the ones between the lines connecting one town to another.

As Stark got a little older and turned his attention back to the U.S., he realized there is plenty of wide-open territory in the places he first dismissed as too developed. America is a big country, and there's more room to roam than even a veteran outdoor writer might think. Some of it is surprisingly close to urban areas, and much of it is not designated as wilderness.

Stark got hold of a map of nighttime images of the U.S. taken from NASA satellites, which showed him where the lights are and where they're not. Lights are on where people live, as anyone who's looked out the window of an airplane at night knows, and darkness on a satellite image is a good indicator of emptiness. With the nighttime map as a guide, Stark hit the library to see what the early explorers did when they saw open space on a map (he's far from the first person to be drawn in that direction) and came up with a list of places that weren't national parks or wilderness areas (with one exception), weren't well-known, had compelling stories about first European encounters with Native Americans and the unknown, and helped influence "America's greatest thinkers and their ideas about wilderness."

The result of Stark's research and travels is "The Last Empty Places: A Past and Present Journey Through the Blank Spots on the American Map." It's an engaging, informative travelogue that combines first-person accounts of driving, rafting and backpacking trips with concise histories of, for instance, the French and Indian Wars and William Bartram's travels through the Southeast. Stark took his family on a canoe trip in northern Maine and uses it as a jumping-off point to explore how Thoreau developed his ideas not only at Walden Pond but also on a memorable trip to Mount Katahdin.

"This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night," Thoreau wrote. "Here was no man's garden, but the unhand-selled globe. Man was not to be associated with it."

Stark rightly notes that Thoreau's removal of man from wilderness was influential and wrongheaded -- humans have always had an effect on landscape, and taking them out of it precludes a full understanding -- but that thinking about wilderness untouched by man has a spirituality and power that is immensely appealing. The ideas of Aldo Leopold, explored in a section on a family backpacking trip into the Gila Wilderness Area of New Mexico, make an effective bracket to the writings of Thoreau.

Of particular interest to Oregonians is a section called "The Lost Country of Southeast Oregon." Stark drove from his home in Montana down Highway 395 past Malheur Lake and into the Steens country. He had a great time. He stopped in Burns and did some research in the Harney County Library on Stephen Meek and the Lost Wagon Train of 1845. Stark also describes another misguided attempt to take a shortcut on the tail end of the Oregon Trail, in 1853. He throws in references to John Day, Washington Irving, Francis Parkman, Pete French and, somewhat less successfully, a long riff on John Muir.

The highlight of Stark's trip to Oregon was his visit to Roaring Springs Ranch and a side trip to a branding operation near the Oregon-Nevada border. Rob Sanders, Stacy Davies and others from the ranch gave Stark a warm welcome, and as he watched the cowboys in action, he felt he found what he came to see.

"A curtain of hail swept over the scene," Stark writes. "Dust streamed from the shuffling hooves of the grunting herd, and out through the corral's wooden fencing, out into the empty sagebrush. It looked like a sepia-toned photograph of the Old West. This is what excited me about 'blank spots' -- the sense of discovery -- that far beyond the homogeneous nodes and exit ramps and strip malls, lay this other life in America, one tied closely to our national identity and history and destiny, that sense of America as a collection of self-possessed individuals, creating an individual destiny, in a vast land, with vast bounty, that has become swallowed up in the anonymity of the interstate exchange and frontage road, among the abstract transactions of hedge funds and mutual funds, among the ephemeral landscapes of cyberspace, the fantasized dramas of television, so that we forget about it, and we lose strength by not seeing it and touching it in its genuine incarnation -- in the flesh. But it still blew on the wind, out here, in the flying dust and open sage."